Sol-Stitium: The Sun Has Stopped. And So Should You.

Right now — at 6:24pm on this Sunday evening in Sydney — something extraordinary is happening. Not the kind of extraordinary that makes noise or asks to be noticed. The quiet kind. The ancient kind.

The Earth has tilted as far away from the Sun as she's going to go, and in this precise moment, the Sun has stopped moving in the sky. Sol — sun. Sistere — to stand still. Solstitium. That's what the Romans called it, and it's what we've been calling it ever since. The solstice. But I want you to really sit with that for a second — not as a calendar date and not as a reason to post a pretty graphic online — but as an actual instruction.

The Sun. Has stopped. And maybe, just maybe, that's your invitation to do the same.

Because here's what (I believe) we don't talk about enough when we talk about the winter solstice. We jump straight to "shortest day, longest night" and then someone pops a candle on, waves some sage, and we call it done. But the ancients knew better. They knew something we've largely forgotten — that this isn't a single-day event. It's a three-day portal. The sun appears to rise and set at almost the exact same point on the horizon for three whole days before it visibly begins to shift. That's three days of cosmic stillness. Three days of the sun holding its breath.

And you know what? Three days keeps showing up everywhere. It's woven through almost every spiritual tradition on Earth — and not by coincidence. Three days in the cave. Three days before resurrection. Three days of mourning before turning toward new life. In Tibetan Buddhism, three days is considered the minimum time the consciousness needs to integrate after death before it moves on. The Egyptians tracked three days of the winter sun "dying" before it was reborn. The Mayans, the Celts, the Norse — all of them understood this threshold. Three is the number of death and return. Of dissolution and reformation. Of the pause that makes the next thing possible. And for the most part, things do happen to us "in threes," as the superstition goes.

So what does that mean for us, living in these bodies, on this land, tonight?

It means this is not the time to push forward. It's not the time to set intentions or vision board your way into the new year either. That's what the return of the light is for.

Right now, we're in the dark. On so many levels too, I would half-jest. We're in the cave. And the cave isn't something to rush through — it's something to inhabit, fully and without apology. And yes, I know caves can be scary, dark and dank sometimes, and of course they conjure up images of bats and vampires and all things slimy for pretty much every human on the planet. But we can also choose to view them as cocoons. As wombs. The isolated yet contained spaces we have retreated to as a species, for millennia, to seek refuge, remember truths that we've forgotten, and access knowledge we have lost.

This is shadow work season in the most literal, elemental sense. The shadow is long. The night is long. And the invitation — if you're willing to receive it — is to turn and face what you usually move too fast to see. To ask yourself some curly questions: What have I been carrying that isn't mine anymore? What patterns have I been feeding that are slowly dimming and diluting my light? What parts of myself have been waiting, patiently and a maybe little impatiently, for me to finally stop long enough to acknowledge them?

And while darkness does tend to come with nefarious connotations, the truth is, the dark isn't our enemy. The dark is the womb. It's where things gestate, where roots deepen, where the seed holds everything it's going to become, but hasn't shown its hand yet.

We live in a culture that is absolutely terrified of the dark — of stillness, of silence, of not producing, not performing, not being on in some way. And yet at the same time, are addicted to, enamored by, all things darkness. You only have to check out Netflix for five seconds to see how deeply fixated humans are on the macabre and inverted.

And so we miss this subtlety. We scroll through the solstice. We bypass the cave. We drone out to our own soul.

But what if, just for these three days — June 21, 22, 23 — you actually let yourself stop?

Not dramatically. Not with a whole retreat infrastructure and a morning routine upgrade. I mean just... genuinely stop. Drop into your body. Feel the cold air on your skin and let it remind you that you are here, in a physical form, on a spinning planet that just paused in its dance around the Sun. (Well, the spinning part is up for debate, but you get my drift.) Sit with what's heavy. Let yourself be in the not-knowing. Let your nervous system come down from the chronic hum of doing and rest in the frequency of being.

Because that's really what this is. An energetic reset. The body, the mind, the energy body — they all need fallow time, just like the soil does. And fallow doesn't mean empty. It means receiving. Absorbing. Processing. It means the invisible work is happening, underneath, in the dark, where you can't see it yet, but it's real and it's necessary and it's good.

In the yoga and medicine traditions I work within, we talk about yin not as the absence of yang but as its necessary counterpart — the receptive, the cool, the deep, the slow. Through this lens, the winter solstice is yin at its most potent. This is when we go in. When we listen instead of speak, when we release instead of accumulate, when we tend the embers rather than throwing more wood on the fire. This is also how we set ourselves up for complete integration down the track.

So tonight, as the Sun pauses over Sydneysiders, both awake and asleep, as the longest night of the year wraps around us like a dark, velvety permission slip — I want to ask you something. What would it feel like to actually be still? Not just physically, but internally. To let the noise settle. To stop rehearsing the future and stop replaying the past and just be here, in the silence, in the dark, in the quiet medicine of this moment.

Because the light will return. It always does. In three days, the Sun will begin its slow, steady journey back. The days will lengthen by barely a minute at first, but they will lengthen. And we will all come out with comments like how fast is time flying? or where did the year go? And when that time comes, there will be so much to step toward, to plant, to create, to become.

But right now? Right now is not that time. Right now is sol-stitium. The Sun has stopped. And so, for just a little while, can you.

So. Rest in the dark, dear ones. Lean into the shade.

There's good medicine there.

AHO